The List of Solutions Offered by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Kristina Martic | 8/17/2017 | Recruitment Marketing

Applicant Tracking Systems are one of the must-have hiring tools. Even though many companies struggle with attracting and engaging high-quality applicants, some still haven’t been able to streamline, simplify and automate hiring processes. List of solutions offered by Applicant Tracking Systems can be extensive. However, some ATS tools have more features than the others.

What are Applicant Tracking Systems

ATS or Applicant Tracking System offers solutions for numerous recruiting goals and challenges in the application stage of candidate journey. Once you have job applicants in your system, recruiting goals become to streamline and simplify hiring process as much as possible.

A modern and well-designed ATS features can help you achieve recruiting goals and overcome challenges by offering following solutions.

Reasons to use Applicant Tracking Systems

With all the emerging recruiting challenges, there are almost no companies that don't use some for of an Applicant Tracking System.

When we asked recruiter about the main reasons for using Applicant Tracking System, this is what they said:

Inability to source people with good skills and characteristics

Manual rejection and feedback to candidates

Manual and time consuming interview scheduling

Extensive use of excel spreadsheets and emails

Messy recruiting and selection process

Inability to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of HR strategy

Long time-to-hire

High cost-to-hire

Lack of talent pool management

Poor and slow communication with candidates

Poor and slow communication with candidates

Hard to keep up with all the applications

Poor quality-of-hire

Solutions offered by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

One candidate database

One of the biggest recruiting challenges involves too much paperwork. This ATS solution enables you to have all of your passive and active candidates and applicants in one single talent pool. Sourced candidates, referrals, applicants from job boards, social media platforms, career sites will all be in one place. Get rid of papers and spreadsheets, and enjoy a more organized way to manage your candidate and applicant pool.

Easy application and candidate search

Often times, companies post new job openings before searching their existing applicant database. In many cases you already have a high-quality applicant in your talent pool, but finding them seems like a mission impossible. With this ATS solution, you can easily search for candidates that have previously applied for a job opening.

Easy application form screening

If you are assessing most important skills and characteristics in your application form, you can automatically disqualify candidates who don’t satisfy those requirements. With this ATS feature, you will be able to build a higher-quality candidate pools that are easier to manage.

Manual screening is considered one of the most time consuming tasks in recruiting, especially when more than half of the resumes received for a role are unqualified.

Easy resume parsing

Many recruiters and HR professionals don’t have the ability to easily extract important information about candidates. This recruiting challenge can be solved with a well-designed ATS that has the ability to extract applicants names and contact info from their resumes within seconds.

Easy resume screening

According to research, it is estimated that resume screening and candidate shortlisting can take 23 hours. Since saving time and money are some of the biggest recruiting goals, making this task easier, faster and more automated is crucial for reducing time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.

Interview kits and scorecards

Accessing the right candidate skills is another important recruiting goal and challenge. Modern ATS features have customizable interview questions and scorecards within the software. You can customize them based on most important characteristics you are looking for in a candidate. This makes candidate evaluation is much easier, organized and efficient.

Schedule interviews with the candidates directly from the software. Automatically share the most important interview information such as structure and location. Proper and easy communication with candidates has become one of the most important recruiting solutions that ATS offers.

Powerful sourcing

With the "War for talent" getting more and more intense, sourcing has become inevitable part of every recruiting strategy. When choosing an ATS to buy, make sure that it has a powerful sourcing tool that will help you find high-quality candidates.

Track and manage candidates’ progress to make your hiring more streamlined. Use existing software’s hiring stages, or create your own to best match your hiring process. Streamlining hiring workflow is probably the most important solution that every Applicant Tracking System should offer.

Create email campaigns in your software to keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process. Timely and relevant communication is crucial for not losing high-quality applicants.

Team collaboration

Sharing important insights and information about candidates with other hiring team members is extremely important to many ATS buyers. One of the most important ATS solutions should be easy team collaboration and communication. In addition, ATS should enable user admins to give different types of access and authority to different team members.

Powerful analytics

Data-driven recruiting is one of the most popular recruiting strategies. Improving without measuring is impossible. That being said, make sure that you Applicant Tracking System has the ability to track and measure every step of you recruiting strategy.

Some of the emerging recruiting goals and challenges are related to proper integration of existing tools. If you are using different online platforms such as Gmail, Slack, platforms for candidate sourcing or candidate testing and assessment, HRIS or Google Analytics, look for an ATS that can easily integrate with them and work well together.

Choosing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to buy

As you can see, Applicant Tracking Systems offer many different solutions for various recruiting goals and challenges. Therefore, buying the right one is not an easy task. However, if you are planning on investing into a new solutions, you should look for as many above mentioned features as possible.